A Study On Influence Of Different Incident Situations On Counterfactual Thinking Of Children

Counterfactual thinking is a supposed thinking activity where an individual psychologically negates and reconstructs some past events that have happened before. In adult cognition it has been a topic of great interest to researchers for many years. However, could the children automatically generate counterfactual thinking under negative events? What is the occurrence and development laws of counterfactual thinking when children are under negative events? How do the different incident situations affect the counterfactual thinking of children? These problems are not clear.The research consists of 3 simulated experiment situations and mainly investigates children of 3-5 years old. Comic books were added into the research materials on the basis of the previous stories. The nature of the incidents, the outcome and the expectancy of the incidents, and the standardization of the incidents have been studied one by one in the research. In experiment 1, the children's counterfactual thinking generates automatically under negative events and the age difference has been explored. Also, it has further explored the types of the counterfactual thinking which generates automatically under negative events. In experiment 2, it has studied the different effects of the expectancy and outcome on counterfactual thinking. In experiment 3, it has studied the effects of different standardized events on counterfactual thinking. The findings of the above experiments are as follows:(1) Children's counterfactual thinking which was generated automatically under negative events develops as the age increases. There are significant differences among the counterfactual thinking of 3,4 and 5 year-old children. (2) There is no significant difference among the counterfactual thinking of child aged 3 which was generated automatically under negative, positive and neutral incident situations. However, there are significant differences for the children aged 4 and 5.(3) There is more and stronger counterfactual thinking when the expectancy is closer to the outcome.(4) Whether the antecedents depart standards, the consequences departing standards could still cause children's more and stronger counterfactual thinking.(5) It is more likely to bring about children's upward counterfactual thinking when they were in the face of negative situations and the outcome of incidents was worse than expected and departs standards. Otherwise, there will be more downward counterfactual thinking.